Global Talent Mobility and Regional Development: The Role of Staffing Agencies in the Growth of East Asian High-Tech Industry

As global talent mobility has become more common, more frequently, recruitment and staffing agencies provide transitional mobility for jobseekers, they have played an increasingly critical role in global knowledge diffusion and regional development. On the basis of depth interview in global staffing agencies and engineers in high tech firms, I argue that the role and functions of staffing agencies in East Asian countries, with particular focus to the cross national mobility of high-skilled labors in Japan, Taiwan and China. It is analyzed that the staffing agencies is increasingly playing a role of global labor market intermediaries in the East Asian high-tech industry, where it accelerates the speed and flexibility of labor market adjustment, and brings crucial impact on technological knowledge diffusion across countries. The staffing agencies build global talent networks and mitigate the risk of managing human resource and personnel training, and provide a job offering and job seeking matching system in order to reduce transaction cost between recruiting firms and jobseekers. The development of global staffing agencies in East Asian countries is closely interconnected with the long term recession, the restructuring of Japanese labor market and wage stagnation of Taiwanese labor market, and the booming economy of China has become the trigger of talent mobility across borders. The staffing agencies has started playing the role of labor market intermediaries in the competition of the recruitment for the best engineers in the rapid growing East Asian high-tech business after China's economic boom.